OK, OK

"I give."
         "Uncle"
                "I didn't mean to say it in the first place."
                       "Really sorry, (Wo)Man."
                               'Won't do it EVER, again!" .... (Well, none of that's true.)

That piece, yesterday, on impermanence? Went over like a Funnel Cake flattenned by a Semi at a Country Fair. Road Kill! Good I didn't show it to those of my progeny who made me swear that I would never leave this house ... AND HERE I AM in my office next to the house we've lived in for 35 years. Good thing one of my inlaw kids came in to carry the 50 pound bags of ice-melting salt for the next foot of shovellable crystals that are due to begin appearing in about 60 hours. Big strapping Pater Familias with a 50 pounder on each shoulder is a thing of the past and my new hero is the person who decided on mass-marketing 50 pound bags of Portland Cement rather than only the usual 80 pounders. Bet s/he was over 60.

But as to the onslaught of criticisms that came by e-mail, claiming that I'm maudlin, melancholic or just plain mad for obsessing about all these matters? I say stick it .... like the kids say ... "where the Sun don't shine."

I remember ..., it was 21 years and seven months ago to the day ... my youngest's 16th birthday. We were out celebrating, realizing full-well that my Father-in-law's lung cancer was responding neither to Surgical Infantry Attacks,  to aerial x-ray bombs or to chemical warfare. Murray was dying and everyone around him was handing out "diner fare" that said something and in many different ways like: "You gotta keep thinking positive. You can't give in to the feelings." At that point, I'd been his son-in-law for over 37 years and felt it OK to whisper in his ear something about how tough these times must be for him and how feeling the feelings seemed to me perfectly "onside" ... (Murray was a hockey-fan who got stuck with a geeky son-in-law who grew up studying Scriptures with no penchant for watching others have good times ... at least not when they were crashing into "boards" or "helmets," and not when they were getting it on sexually. "Murray ... it's ok to feel shitty about all this. I'm willing to cry with you."

My comment was obviously loud enough to get Annette to bawl me out for being being on my "high horse" and for trying to depress her husband. My youngest doesn't reflect back happily, either, on the kerfuffle that ensued and assuredly does not  refer back to it  as a "sweet sixteen party," But, it's not just matters of life and death that deserve the gift of allowing in wistfulness for losses observed and for those crouching and waiting to surprise us and, arguably, pounce on us.

So many of the changes that we Last Quarter Players have incorporated into our daily routines and thinking have been all but imperceptible. The changes in our kids -- if we chose to spoon and spawn -- as they grow up. Being no longer the feeder and the changer, as toddlers learn to feed themselves and wipe their own buts. The holding hands in parking lots that is no longer. The being the expert on Arithmetics and Geometries and Writings and handling our kids relational catastrophes. And there are similar losses for those who've decided not to reproduce.

I remember when M was unpacking that same youngest into a Dorm Room and I was weeping in the College Courtyard, outside. I recognized those losses, too, and wrote:

Once Before the Altar

The skies above were clear

His eyes were sore,

No pause for crying anymore.

McDowell, Randal, and Campbell Halls

Sycamore trees above a mall.

She’s inside

Unpacking her childhood and leaving behind

The dolls and toys that  filled her mind

For eighteen years that came before

When she and dad played on the floor.

Not at the altar he gives her away

But today

To McDowell, Randal and Campbell Halls.

The Sycamore trees above the mall

Can offer neither peace nor solitude.

No time for age old platitudes

From Dear Old Dad and what he’d say

To take his little girl’s pain away.

But a few more words, he’ll pass her way

Before they hug and wish good day

No matter what, you’re not alone.

Don’t forget, you’ve still a home.

And please, oh please,

Use the phone.

 Sad and joyous to let them go, kids, friends, parents and grandparents. And then there are the losses of function that go beyond not being able to swing about 50 pound bags of this and that. More than the recognition of mortality, there are the losses in memory that so many tout ... the progressive inability to recall names out of our aging hard-drives. My 15 year old grand daughter last night, as we cut her birthday cake, averred that if someone asked her to to smoke pot, she'd respond: "No thank you. I don't want my brain to shrivel up into a head of dried cauliflower." (Guess she's not moving to Colorado for University Studies.) Well, Kid, that Gourd eventually dries up, anyway. No, beyond all those cognitive losses are the reasons that on Cialis commercials, the old folk have forgotten that sex is better in one claw-footed tub ... rather tan in two. Hell, it was better in the back of a '65 Corvair!. 

What happened to spontaneous erections and lubrications? Twenty percent of the male population is just waiting for an erection that lasts more than four hours ... Busting at the seams to call their doctors: "Doc: that little blue pill y'gave me? Four and a half hours and no myocardial infarction. Feel like I was 15, again, riding the subways and getting excited about anyone wearing a skirt. You think 2 pills would translate into 9 hours?" 

No. You naysayers who think I'm lost in depression, are missing out on all the pleasant and titillating memories of the first Three Quarters of Play and those of the Fourth Quarter, too ... at least, those that I can still recall. Any case? You can keep your comments ... stick'em, as I suggested earlier.

OK. Enough! ... I have forgotten the first sentences of this riff and will accept as a given that it went somewhere ... as I sign off.

Carpe Diem, Old Folks, Carpe Diem! ... and, BTW, keep the keys and the tissues and the Ginkgo Paloba (and the Little Blue Pills, if y'need 'em) where you can find them.

The Illusion of Permanence

I was out doing errands with M ... picking up a birthday cake for a 15 year old wondrous grandchild. Took a back way to avoid the main-drag potholes. Potholes are the talk of the town as March approaches ... potholes and the cold and snowy Winter. We drove by a house ... Pennsylvania field stone. It was for sale. I thought to myself ... "Another family moving on."

I wondered about their story ... the story of the family that moved on. Of course, in the Modern World, it would be rare to be acquainted of the story of this family that moved on. I knew two people who lived not far from that house but it was unlikely that either Danny or Ilsa would have any information. And I'm not certain that I know them well enough to ask.

It was ... I should say ... it is a big house. Well maintained with stone walls surrounding parts of the property that contained the home of the family I didn't know. It was certainly big enough to have housed parents and a bunch of kids. The driveway was large enough, too, to have held cars ... for parents and adolescents. "Maybe," I thought, "the kids grew up and found girlfriends or boyfriends ... and schools and jobs and were having kids of their own. Maybe Mom and Dad were downsizing, as the euphemism would have it."

Curious how we just don't know. Wouldn't think of knocking on the door to ask ... not in the 21st Century ... not in these times of alienation. "Maybe one of the parents died ... or has Alzheimer's ... or maybe they're ex-hippies moving to Denver to smoke legal Pot ... or to Arizona, now that Gov. Brewer vetoed the bill that would permit restaurateurs to deny them a seat at a counter due to their unconscious homosexual fantasies." I laughed at my thoughts ... quietly. If Emile Zola opined that he came to life to live loudly, he lived in a different county. Here in this shire, we're quiet. And we don't knock on strangers' doors for fear they might shoot us thinking that we had come to shoot them. Was it Hannah Arendt who spoke of living lives of quiet desperation?

I drove on reminding myself ... quietly, need I add ... that even the best of houses are only on loan. ... and loans must be repaid, in spite of any illusions to the contrary. I've lived in our present home and worked in the attached office for 35 years ... We came with three kids, 2, 12 and 13 years old. They grew up. Someday, we'll have to leave.

Tomorrow, M and I will have been together for 49 years and tonight we'll have cake with a 15 year old writer named Sophie and her younger Sisters and her Mom and Dad.

It's not all "play" in the Last Quarter but there are times for that, as well.

They Come and Go

Grandchildren came and left, today.

Grandpa and GuntherDog both need naps.

The Disenfranchised

Do I have a vote in what we do? Should I have a preference. More and more of the visitors who occasion my office -- statistically speaking, older men and younger women ... but both genders -- should to question whether it's cool to have wishes, nevermind demands.

Maybe it was yesterday that I dropped a riddle on line in a discussion group:

                         A Carpenter, a cook, an electrician and a gardener go into a shower naked
                         and ready to clean up after a long day. Only one man comes out. Whazzup?

A 60'ish woman posted back that she didn't get it. I explained.

Sorry, Josefine .... It's the male version of the harried wife
syndrome. For those of us blessed/cursed with longer lives and spouses
that hold on till "The End of Days," there is what appears to be a statistically apparent
difference between men and women's lives.

Women, many of them here in this Culture, are the great jugglers of the
early years. They wear a half-dozen different hats and this is often
the case during adolescence of the kids, as well. When the kids leave,
some of that changes. The Old Guy is home more often ... sharing the
cooking and feeding of only several mouths, unless a previous
generation moves in or one of the orbiting kids loses altitude.

Many men, myself included, until the kids moved out could use the kids
as indentured helpers .... When they're gone (again, I am speaking in
grossly general terms), shoveling the walk, electrical jobs, replacing
subfloors,  roofs, just something as simple as carrying big non-hardy
plants in at the end of their outside season .... all these tasks are now
-- at least sometimes -- solitary ones.

The riddle plays on all those jobs (and throw in work, if not retired) falling to
the same person .... the pater familias occasionally mourns that all
those tasks fall on him and the kids leaving has more than an emotional
component.

I, for instance, when I'm doing electrical work or need some editorial
assistance would appreciate and, indeed, mourn the missing set of hands and/or eyes. As to the
cooking, M did most of it from 1965-1994 ... The years we had kids
running around or bivouacked in the house, anyway. I took over my half
of that from the mid-90's. ... And kept the electrical, tree-trimming
(not talkin' tinsel on a cut tree but chainsaws on a fallen one),
carpentry, inside and outside gardening, ....

The riddle is me feeling a bit for myself, I suppose.


So, there I was Wednesday night .... the zone-valve on the furnace was bad ... need to remove and refit a new one and wire same into the thermostat system.  Struggled for a bit. "Do I just hold screwdriver in one hand and light in other?" "Do I ask M to come down into the Belly of the Beast to assist? ... 'Be my Valentine, please, and be a dear in our old cellar!"

Any case, I'm finding more and more men caught up in feeling they can do it all ... or must do it all ... and must never -- I say never -- ask for help. Including cutting up that cherry tree that fell under the weight of the ice-storm .... shoveling -shoveling-shoveling ....cooking .... Nevermind "chewing gum and walking, at same time," what about "Balding and wielding a chain saw in the same moments of our tender lives, just before consulting with your kids on the complexities of middle age and taking off the requisite tie at the end of a long day."

"OK, OK ... Just feeling a little sorry for myself. I'll get over it."

WOOF

Health

Yesterday, the theme of what constitutes the Good Life seemed to find its way into many of interactions that came my way ....

In meetings with visitors in my office, existential questions arose over "Is it worth it?" .... "What's it all about" .... "How can we possibly integrate all the years that have gone by and make sense of them" ....

At a reading group, I was I was the irritant, after those visits, who kept wondering about why the specialists in treating Mental Illness spent so little time focusing on the differences in the way health is conceptualized.

Then, this morning, M told me that visiting kids and grandkids spotted a red-red Cardinal foraging in the Rhodies and Azaleas. I don't know the Big Answers, but that Bird needs to fly South out of this brutal North Eastern Winter .... And so do I.

Woke up, yesterday and once again, to snow. I'm gonna get me a possum rifle and go shoot Puksatawny Phil ... whatever his name is.

Disgruntled and Too-Tired-to-be-Witty in Philly.

Storms in My Head

It was one of the people that Dr. Freud wrote about who talked about having "storms in her head." Houses may or may not be haunted but the minds of Members of Clan Anthropos are occupied with no shortage of ghosts. This weekend, M and I watched three movies ... all about haunting memories ....

Brickman and Allen's Annie Hall
A Spanish Film: City without Limits
An Indy-Israeli Documentary Film: The Flat

Thinking just of these films where a neurotic New Yorker has to deal with loss -- in a sense, all memory is about things-lost -- of a lover and, in the latter two films, where adult children work, after a death of a keeper of secrets and memories dies, to uncloak ghosts of their ancestors' experience ... in one, memories relating to the Spanish Civil War, and, in the other, memories of the Holocaust of WWII.

Linkings ...

Memories, Secrets, Loss and the ability to produce Narratives are all part of the equipment of humankind. It was the same weekend that an Internet collocutor sends a hyperlink to Odetta's Sometimes I Feel like a Motherless Child. Listening to the first couple of bars of Odetta singing immediately kindled both Odetta's version and Paul Robeson's.  The mere mention of the Woody Allen/Marshall Brickman film set off memories for a dear friend of ours ... telling us of how ashamed we should be for owning a copy of one of Woody Allen's films. The Spanish Film set ablaze memories of my Grandmother lighting tables full of candles to keep the memory of all of her relatives who had been slaughtered. As that memory fired, I began thinking of the generations who would remember all the recent massacres ... in Iran and Iraq during their war ... in Syria ... in a half-dozen African countries ... in Serbia ... in Armenia ... in Hungary and Poland and the Ukraine .... in Stalin's Russia and in Mao's China. Memories flood .... chain ... couple ... overtake the mind.

I suppose it was in an attempt to bind these memories that I became stuck on a song that I occasionally may have thought of in the past 50+ years ... a meditative and haunting song ... "The breath is Yours ... and its body is Yours ... Have mercy, please have mercy on Your handiwork."

The haunting melody came to me after the Spanish Film on the way to have dinner with M and my friend and his wife who hates Woody Allen because of what she remembers about him. I drove singing it ... I walked about the house singing it and humming it ... M had to remind me that toning it down -- just a hair -- might permit other voices to be heard ... I woke up and was humming it in the middle of the night ... and then in the morning? it was there, once again.

I remember (there it goes, again) using Tiger Balm for headaches 40+ years ago. An Old Vietnamese remedy ... mostly camphor, I seem to recall ... a spot placed in the middle of the forehead to move the focus of the pain from the vascular system to the skin. Memories ... Storms in my Head ... maybe are arranged in such a manner as to cover collections of more painful memories. They same Doctor from Vienna called these "Screen Memories" .... for me? I suspect I'll sing that song in my head for many days until some of the more painful memories have flown away ... "like a dream flies away."

Two of our grandchildren from far away will be arriving later, today, and will help drive some of these storms offshore ... the storms will begin their orbit around the Seven Seas and -- I have no doubt of this -- will return.



 

"They rain and snow on everyone"

A cyber-friend sent to a little discussion group to which we both belong a hyperlink to a Last Quarter Joni Mitchell singing "Clouds." Years, ago, it seemed so much safer to write about my Wing-tipped shoes that were gathering dust in the bottom of my closet ... I wondered then how a totally impersonal time takes "a man and turns him to lore." Some details have accumulated in the twenty years that have, since, gone by.

Here's the hyperlink

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tKQSlH-LLTQ

My friend reported how moved she was by the depth of the older "Joni" ... 'even if her performance now lacked the high notes.'

Joni, I guess your clouds don't only "rain and snow on everyone" ... much more. We watched you when you -- and we -- were kids, playing and frolicking in your youth and ours. Indeed, "They rain and snow on everyone." When I was very young, we moved about, as my Dad was seeking to earn a living and as my Mom took care of her brood ... spread out over eight years ... born from 1940-1948 ... all now grandparents ... all now orphans. We lived in places with stoops and then in houses with porches ... places from which neighbors could be heard and spoken to. 

I've pissed and moaned a lot about shoveling -- I called these storms -- 'The Snows of Killa-ma-Mojo" in honor of the back-aches and arrhythmias my shoveling managed to produce.... Curious, though, how it takes bad weather, these days, to emancipate many of us from our heated and air-conditioned homes into the social street.

                                                            "Some storm, aye?"

                                                                 "Lotta snow."

                                                              (It's mid-February)

                            

                              "Did I get a chance to wish you and yours a Happy New Year."

                                                "Aw. Things just got busy, I suppose."

M talks often about her wish for a big wraparound porch. Her childhood house was built in the mid-1950's with a porch built in the back ... a screened-in porch from which neighbors could barely be seen. That's not the porch which, I suspect, she has in mind.

Don't know. Woke up this morning with a memory from the post-9/11 Winter or Spring, I can't recall. M and I were to pick up my Mom and Dad and take them to a wedding. My parents, in their Last Quarter and Overtime, lived in Northern New Jersey and the wedding was in Brooklyn ... a half hour to the Lincoln Tunnel and then over one of the midtown crossings from Manhattan to Brooklyn.

We arrived early ... Dad was in a huff. Mom, already pretty bald and lost in the haze of beginning dementia, got something ... maybe pleasure ... out of hiding things from her husband of 60+ years, at that time. This time, she flipped and hid her wig. I think M found it but Mom refused to put it on. Dad was beside himself ... dissociated with helplessness and frustration and, I can only imagine, disappointment. It's hard to keep in mind that clouds really do "rain and snow on everyone."

Told my Dad:

                                                            "Let's go. I got it."

Dad had not been there (ex-WWII soldier boys left a lot behind in their theaters of war) and, other times, had been there. 

                                                             "I got it, Dad." 

I put on Mom's wig and gathered everybody into the car, chauffeuring them through cities and towards tunnels and bridges protected by young men bearing automatic rifles ... soldiers keeping our streets safe, as Joni also reminded us of years ago, "for our wives and our daughters."  

New York, I guess, is New York. No one stopped the guy in the wig driving his accomplice and two old farts through these "hard targets." 

"All's well that ends well," I suppose. When we arrived at the venue, Mom willingly donned her wig and, now, "wigged out," as she assuredly was, went in to see her great niece get married. Mom walked in on her own steam and on the arms of her husband and son, escorted by her daughter-in-law who by now was far more daughter than in-law.

Perhaps ... just perhaps ... sleep is disrupted in the Last Quarter in order to permit us quiet time to remember. This morning I remembered driving through the Lincoln Tunnel with more hair than I've had -- or likely will have -- in these days, and months and years that have followed.

                                            Life rains and snows on every living thing.

Bad Hair Day

Bad hair day? Only, it's not my hair. with all the snow and the changing times at which visitors are scheduled to arrive, I couldn't recall if I made an appointment for 700AM. I knew there was no six, negating the hypothesis that too much snow shoveling had rendered me brain-dead ... only that due to advanced neuropathy, the message had not yet arrived at my prefrontal cortex .. 50 cent way to say that I've become a cockadoodle-doo away from a rooster without a head!

Philadelphia, a friend noticed, looks like Buffalo where our families spent much of the late 60's and early 70's.Didn't feel so bad, then.  I guess if there are enough people around you blowing Woostock Mixture .... blown snow and blown dope .... shoveling seems to pass in an enjoyable if attenuated flash. It's different in the Last Quarter. The Prophets tell you "you're gonna die" if you shovel that wet stuff ... We call it the "widow maker."

My dreams are frightening and tend to fly off in the middle of the night when I wake up with "horror" and "atrial fibrillation." Not certain which way the arrow points .... Frightening Pavor Nocturnis dreams yielding atrial fib or vice versa. My young Cardiologist assures me that each of these snow events acts like a cardiac tread mill test ... I stress my heart ... if I don't keel over ... chances are that the Ole Pump is A-OK.If not, he'll fill my appointment with another guy around his Father's or Grandfather's age and whisper sweet NOTHINGS in his ear.

Many men come and visit me ... I suppose? half my visitors. They are struggling either to enter, to stay or to leave the role of Pater Familias ... of the guy who knows how to do it all .... like he was one of these special-ops types wearing all white and carrying Kalishnakovs and RPGS in their half track trek in the Northwest Territories ... trying to find the headquarters of Icy Finger and Snow Job ... shoveling, driving in snow, keeping the burner working and the fireplace full of split and air-dried maple ... knowing exactly what to do when Junior is poised to crash into a tree while her Daddy is thinking about how well he looks in his new down jacket ....

Can you imagine the irony ... CAN YOU DIG IT .... living in what used to be the Presby Widows Home and shoveling heavy snow to try to make certain that no beds go empty.

Hey! It's hard nowadays to figure out which are widows, nevermind which are Presby's.

Not Only Moses has to Deal with Pragmatics

Just in from second shift of snow shoveling. The snow is medium heavy and so-so deep .... maybe 10". The Prophets predict another 5" or so. Brings two things to mind.

1) Jeremiah's first prophecy comes to mind. God troubles him for his free associations ... Go, figure ... God as psychoanalyst. Poor depressed Jerry says ... Hey, Big Guy ... I don't have my own voice. Go is not pleased.

                              No Jerry, tell me what you really see and stop all this resistance.

Jerry responds reluctantly.

                              I see a pot and it's boiling over from the North.

I never quite got God's interpretation but I've been told that patients don't always understand the deep interpretations of their therapists .... for God tells him that armies are going to gather in the North Country and swoop down on Jeremiah's people, cause they done God wrong. As a kid, when I first read it, I was convinced that the pot shoulda been boiling over it's South side if the enemy was to spill in from the North.

No matter. Jeremiah, who was also told a little later -- after this deal with his God was brokered -- that he couldn't have a woman in his life, in his prophetic vision may have not only seen the exile but may have divined that Handel was destined to choose Isaiah 40 for the Libretto for his Messiah Suite. No women and no concert halls! Dang. This snow storm came -- not from the North but -- from deep in the heart of Dixie!

2) Shoveling snow may well be God's way of culling the herd after the indentured children have found lives of their own.  Each storm finds some number of men failing to get back inside and failing to make any snow angels ... just lying there inert in the snow ... Now, that I think of it, I wonder if those little kids with their snow angels aren't attempting to channel Grandpa? or Grandma? "Grandpa's shoveling clouds in the sky." Oh, those sweet little grand-spawn and their imaginations.

Any case, made me think about my own life and that of my older visitors. Spouses tend to express concern after activities that involve muscle training with repetitive motion. Indeed, the most common three occasions that I hear stories about in which partners of all stripes ... first-time-arounders and repeat-offending partners, alike ask: "Are you really OK ... are ... I bet you can guess ...

                                               Vigorous sex-play

                                                    Snow shoveling and

                                                         Potato peeling.

More shoveling to do.

"M ... I'm gonna be just fine .... pass the defibrillator."

The Young Weatherfolk

They appear to revel in their youth and their prophetic vision on the depth of the next snow-blanket. I remember in the winter of 1954, someone wrote in to the weatherperson ... Noe email, then, but a postcard: "I just shoveled 18" of partly cloudy from my front walk." I'll take Nehemiah!

Mo' Moses

"When I woke up this morning, you were on my mind ...." Who sang that? I don't remember.

M told me that Shirley Temple Black, the curly-girly that boys and girls alike fell in love with ... Heidi, the naturally born physical therapist who cures her friend, Klara's hysterical  inability to walk, had died at 85. But that wasn't on my mind when I rose.

I guess the "you" of the above song refers back to Old Man Moses and the suggestion made by a friend that I, maybe ... just, maybe, identified with my Dad, a raging Moses of the 20th C, as well as the Moses who lived maybe 3400 years ago..

My second thought was a "aha!." With all my protests against such identifications, I could hardly deny that when I wanted to pen a painted document commemorating my youngest child's confirmation into her people, I  began it not with some modern poetry, not with Shakespeare or Omar Khayyam and not even with the ambivalent Swan Song blessings that Moses offered up, at the end, but with his poem that followed.

"Ear up, Heavens and let the Earth hear the spoken words of my mouth." He continues his introduction describing what is to come in his soliloquy  ... "My teaching will drop like heavy rain ... my words will flow as dew ... as the light rains upon the Desheh and and the later rains upon the blades of grass."

Moses, at least at the end, wanted to wax poetic; so do I .. Maybe we both shoulda sung:  "On the good ship, Lollipop, it's a sweet trip to the candy shop."

Alas ... Moses turn to the perfection of his God who spoke with him face to face but couldn't stand back from his horror at the "twisted and perverse generation" that was his life's-job to lead., "A stupid people? And not wise!" He advises them to seek counsel from parents and the aged ....  that would be him, I suppose ... and now it would be us. He clearly worries that without him, nothing good will be allowed to stand.

If you read Moses' "slam," (Deuteronomy 32) you may feel the arrhythmic rhythm of a person falling between two stools ... the one representing the restful lap of his loving God, the same one who is about to end his journey just shy of his goal ... the wish to enter his Promised Land. Crane wrote something like the following about life's journey and our hopes:

I saw a man
Pursuing the horizon.
Round and round, they sped.
I accosted him,
"You can never," I said.
"You lie," he said and ran on.

Moses' other stool? I suppose that was resident in his love for his people and served as good ballast for his opposing sense of disappointment in them.

I don't know whether I identify with Moses, as my friend wondered. I think I do know that the juggling of glee and sadness -- which I have mentioned so often in these ditties -- must be joined by attempts at another balancing act ... the ability to love, that is, to envy those missing parts of ourselves that we see in the beloved and to accept the reality of an unavoidable disappointment in anything or anyone, thus idealized.

I dunno, but worth thinking-on, some more.

Rest in Peace, Shirley!

What to Say?

More Snow to Blow
Less Time for Old Mo-ses ...
Today

Need to return but, for now, extra time
goes back to the interferences laid down
on my visitors' path by Old Man Winter.

This, too, shall pass.

"Shovel, shovel, shovel thine walk
With Equanimity ...
Never get Sour, or Dour or Glower
At what Life has Given Thee"

Moses, Moses and Me

Until they composted him, Lee Hayes would sing his get up and go song .... "Old age is golden, or so I’ve heard said, But sometimes I wonder, as I crawl into bed, With my ears in a drawer, my teeth in a cup, My eyes on the table until I wake up. As sleep dims my vision, I say to myself: Is there anything else I should lay on the shelf? But, though nations are warring, and Congress is vexed, We’ll still stick around to see what happens next!"

Odd, as we get older the thoughts that play with our sensibilities before and after sleep .... the hypnagogic and hypnopompic visions that are always best left on our pillows. This morning, I rose with a question someone had asked me recently .... It was not so long ago that I noticed glimmers of the stutter that accompanied me for about 28 years early on in my life. I sought this person out as they had knowledge of breathing and other parts of life, as well. She had asked me whether I ever considered how I felt about Moses, the betimes angry desert Lawgiver and intimate of his God in whose presence he walked. "After all," she wondered, "you, like Moses, stuttered and recognize an ancient angry shadow that maybe has gone dormant but must still be there." 

I forgot about it, woke up this AM and wondered how I felt about Ole Moe! My dad's name was Moses and he was one of the angry soldier-boys who "came marching home, hurrah, hurrah" from WWII. He may have not had a speech impediment, but I suspect that his four kids at times may have wished otherwise.

Moses? Many are the times when I've cited his Five Books ... Interestingly, I more often cite Book I, the one that starts "In the beginning" and doesn't get as far as the Moses story. I've not been critical of him in my writings, but I've also not been praising of him. I've long thought of him as a sharp cookie, not humble like Scripture claims, except and interestingly, when he recoils from taking on a leadership post with his people and when Moses tries to beg it off: But, God, ... I am foreskinned of the lips (whatever that means .... he uses the words 'aral sphasayim' and that would be a literal translation) .... How can I "Go down moses way down into Egypt Land and tell Old Pha-a-aroah to let my people go" when I stutter. Outside of that singular situation at the iconic bush, Moses is a powerful, can-do and sometimes explosive guy.

Me, explosive? I dunno. No one has confused me with Jesus and, in fairness, no one has accused me of being WildMan Barrabas, either. I am interested in my "fuse," but I fear that I can't gage that ... others must. 

Me, a "can-do" kinda guy? Well, yeah! Indeed, that's what I and maybe GuntherDog both miss about this Last Quarter gig. Gunther used to run like the wind and I (once upon a youngish guy) would think nothing of building walls or driving extremely fast cars. I "can-do" plumbing and while I would leave a 60' Maple to the young, I see no reason not to take on a 35 footer ... none have hit the house, yet! I once had to build a retaining wall .... mostly about 5' tall and maybe two-thirds around a 70 foot long ellipse. Engineers told me I couldn't built it with the design I worked out. I listened, conscripted my sons into service, and off we went. It may fail someday but 30 years afterwards, it holds up the dirt just the way a retaining wall should. I haven't been electrocuted, yet, and while I lost some friends after writing a controversial book in the 90's and could barely stand on my hips after 10 months of heavy writing, when I reread the book every few years, I still like the author, even if we disagree, here and there.

Me, a Lawgiver? I'm pretty comfortable with other folk's decisions as longer as they harm no one too much. Old Moe and his God had these two kinds of Laws ... sometimes, translated as Statutes (Chukim) and Laws (Mishpatim). The Laws were those that seemed good candidates for what some Supreme Courtiers think of as Natural Laws. Thou shall not murder .... thou shall not steal ... Thou shall not trip a blind person or curse a deaf one ...etc. ... Laws that make the community run well ... allow for individuals to live the Good Life in polities of mutual concern and interest. But, then, he had these other laws. OK to eat most parts of cows but no parts of dogs. OK to wear linen garments! OK to wear wool garments. Not OK to wear wool and linen garments. I got the "Teach your children dilligently" but what's the haute couture value of fringes on garments and what's the problem with pulling some hair or raking your skin when you hear that someone you loved died?  I'm hard-pressed to find those kinds of statutes in me and the older I get, the closer to Overtime, if y'permit me, the less interested I get in things and theories that make little sense. 

Howard, you're ignoring how often you quote the non-anti-gay portions of Leviticus 19 and forgetting, too, your oft-cited claim that Moses -- by only addressing the pragmatic Z'vulon and not the ethereal Yissasschar in his swan-song-blessing at the end of the Pentateuch and just before he died -- was a fan, just like you, of what the Old French Scholar and scriptural commentary just mentioned, Rashi, called "prakmatia." 

OK, I get the picture. I just reread the above and I find a kernel of truth in the claim that I might identify with Old Man Moses. A kernel of truth all the more evident in my defensiveness. Damn! Sometimes people read us better than we read ourselves. No surprise, I suppose. As a young man, I identified with four old men and took them on as mentors. A Biblical scholar who walked the Earth as my grandfather. Two Mathematicians ... one, Kazimierz K., who nurtured my love of Mathematics and another, Alexander G., who guided me in a direction that had me leave it in favor of something ... aha! ... more pragmatic. Then, there was Harold F., who helped me see the connection of my speech impediment to the sharp letters I revelled in writing and that so often mussed others' dander during the first half of the Second Quarter. I think I need to hear the non-Old-Men voices, too.

And then there was Lee Hayes, and Burl Ives, and ... oh, yeah ... my two sons who are beginning to look like Old Men! I could learn from them, too. There's still time, perhaps! In the Last Quarter, we should be able to laugh at ourselves. No? 

Wonder if Old Moe was cool with laughing at his squeamishness when he needed Zipporah, his wife and Mom of their first born, to wield the circumcisers knife in correcting for not her husband's foreskinned lips, but for their son's foreskinned penis.

In the Delivery Room, the first thing I noticed about our only daughter was that she was born perfect .... "no surgical corrections needed on this one." (M's OB quickly complimented me on my perspicacity.)

I need to come back to this ... OBVIOUSLY! later!

"I sure am feeling sorry for the pony"

Rogers and Hammerstein in lyrically puzzling over the land wars between the Farmers and the Cowboys have characters attempt to present the opposition in a more appealing light ... one goes somethin like this for the Cowboy:

               The road he treads is difficult and stony.
               He drives for days on end
               With just a pony for a friend ...

When the roasting voice comes in ...

               I sure am feeling sorry for the pony.


My Pony? GuntherDog accompanies me through old age. He sleeps in an old overstuffed chair that once sat in M's parents' den where M's Dad tended his fish and read the paper ... watched hockey games and early television. Gunther tries to climb on the bed but a mere nod from his Mom, my Lady, M and he toddles dutifully from bed to chair. Lately, he's been slower at it.

Early AM, I get up, run to the bathroom for a moment and dress sufficiently to get GuntherDog downstairs to the door ... out to pee. Gunther has, for years, paused at the top landing.

              "I'm not goin' down stairs till you pet my head, Schmuck."

I don't know why he lacks the respect to call me Dad or Dear Ole Dad or Sir, if he must. So, I pet his head and tell him he's a Good Boy and doesn't have to call me Schmuck. Gunther relents and comes down for his AM toilette.

But I don't have it right and that saddens me. It's hard for me to accept that Gunther is my good Last Quarter "bud" .... that Gunther, as M pointed out to me, yesterday, chances are has some arthritis ... just like his loving Mom and Dad. When we treat someone even a little as an object, we forget that they're aging and suffer all the vagaries and vicissitudes of aging that we suffer. Whether we're idolizing them or depreciating them, when we stop treating our others as changing Souls, we're mercilessly objectifying them. Whether a friend who can't come out and play anymore ... a lover who ain't what s-he used to be ("many long years, ago," as the song goes) ... or a pooch whose gone through too many of the Snows of Killa-ma-mojo and now walks with a limp, pauses before jumping off a chair or is frightened to do that four-legs-flying run down the stairs .... whenever we forget that we're aging together .... whenever we do that we neglect the quintessential human-ness or poochiness of our beloved.

Aging is tough ... Moses goes out with a plea ... 'God! You've just begun with me ... Don't stop, now.' Jesus goes with his Eli, Eli, lamah Sabachtani (which either means my Lord! Why have you abandoned me or My Lord! Why do you slaughter me) and a quick 'forgive them.' Or Mohammad's plaint laying across Aisha's lap that his preference is for God and Eternity .... last decades, last moments, Last Quarters may well be the appropriate time for reconnecting with the Soulness of our others ... not their fixed objectivity but their evanescent and ever-changing subjectivity .... ah! for those of us already there, it's the only time.

• It's 600 AM, do you know where your dog is?
• Have you given him (or her) a hug, yet, today.

Woof! As it is not written in Isaiah 40: A bark calls out from the wilderness .... turn, ye, the way to me, Mom and Dad, you're all I got and I need my Kibble.

Be right there, Gunther!

"A Time to Try the Soul of Men"

And women.

The Northeastern parts of the USA were coated by icy crystals before whom "who can stand." Philly had about 1/3 of an inch of ice that followed a wet snow. Outside the crackling of the ice on the trees would all too often be followed by the crack of limbs. Large piece of the Willow Tree that has longed to eat up my office came thudding down, shaking the office even though it hadn't hit it. A Black Cherry from next door came through the wooden fence, destroying Schreber Gate.

Ah, Schreber Gate. We got SchreberDog when he was a pup and he grew into sizable proportions and a chronic xenophobia that showed itself in antagonism to any previously-unmet visitors. We learned that a loaf of bread -- cheap bread was OK ... Schreber wasn't a fussy eater -- fed one slice at a time from whatever taxi delivered this stranger to the front door and Schreber would remember them, thereafter. Schreber came 37 years ago, not long before we moved into our home and my office.

This is all Old Man Talking and besides the point. SchreberDog loved to run ... err ... gallop. And the way our yard was set up, it was best to trellis part ... ah ... but that was part of Schreber's Circuit and would intrude on his free circuitry. Youngish Man to the rescue. A swinging trellace that was open on the bottom! "And everything was easy cause of youth." .... Well, not everything.

In any case, Schreber Gate is no more ... lying dead under the Cherry Tree just like tears ago the first pre-Geodesic swing set that I and the guys built for the younger sister was smooshed by a Norway Maple that went the way of all things.

Circuits and Cycles ... Health and Illness ... Life and Death.

The ice, I lie to myself, woulda been easier without the first arrhythmia in a year that has lasted more than 36 hours .... that easier without the "Feel like a watermelon about to be bashed by Gallagher" head-cold .... all easier if the Cherry Tree had held on just a little loner and if the Gas Company -- come supposedly to repair the leak at the 30' from the office gas meter -- hadn't checked the leak at the House Heater's Gas Valve down the basement.

Gas-man: Sir, I gotta shut'er down, unless'n you get a CONtractor in here before we leave.

My religion in large centers on the precepts of (1) not gratuitously causing another human Agata for doing their job and (2) giving others the presumption of good intentions in deciding where their footfalls land.

Dear God, described by David in Psalms (and Psalm 147, in particular, God!), I bow to you in thanks for not making mine one of the 600,000 households without heat or electricity in the days just past Penn's Sylvania. Curious, isn't it, that 600,000 or so was the number that purportedly broke their chains of servitude to Pharaoh in Egypt, took off for parts unknown, leaving a seaful of Pharaoh's armies drowning in the Sea of Reeds.

Wishin' Y'coulda saved Schreber Gate but understandin' that you must be pretty busy, these days, Yourself.

Old Men Joking

En garde! Right Guard! Someone has questioned my humor, besides, that is, some people who claim a kinship relationship with me.  

With kids, my humor is performance (I hesitate to call it) art. I am Melmo ... or "I, Melmo" ... if one listens to Masterpiece Theater and all that highbrow stuff. Melmo is 5 going on 6 .... "when I'm gonna be big." Now that my grandchildren are older, they rarely make pilgrimages to the 7 foot totem carved in the back yard on the stump of a felled Black Cherry. Especially, the three of them who are 10. The older ones? the younger one? they're cool with making space for Melmo, as long as he doesn't come to their school or appear in a pizza shop. A 15 year old waxing writer wants Melmo sentenced to lethal injection for his half hour appearance while waiting for take-out  at our local Palestinian Pizza Shoppe. 

On line? It's been the kind of doggerel that I've let Clio's Psyche and Arnie Richards' International Website publish. Old guy .... ... trying to figure things out as he's looking retirement in the face. Tragico-Comedy? Maybe.

What to say? The spices I use in my cooking? some like ... some don't. I did have one visitor to my office, a Norwegian, who really didn't like my rare moments of humor. I referred her out to a guy named Sven, whose humor, as far as I knew, always involved drunk people. I figured if I didn't get it, the Norwegian might. Tell me a joke and I'll tell you whether I get it? whether it moves me? whether I can get in your laughing boat and row-chuckle with you? 

There was a study done on parents and children that, in part, concluded that it was the synchrony of one person's needs and the other person's gifts that was most predictive of a healthful development. A low-energy child born to a high-energy Mom -- or vice versa -- leads to frustration and disappointment.

Zo, there's a 6 foot fence boundarying my office path from the back yard .... If my visitors peer through, they can make out two geodesic swing sets (a rarefied form of whimsy, I admit)... a children's slide that uses the 8 foot stump of a pear tree carved into the Great Australian Pig God, Baalum, and if they just look far enough ... Melmo is looking back at them. (A boy and his chain saws .... one never knows what grotesquerie he might carve on a rainy Sunday) ... 

So anyone got something to say or a good joke? As my Mom heard me say to Margaret in the back yard more than 60 years ago: You show me yours, and I'll show you mine. 

That having been said ... My mom left quite a while ago, Margaret and her drunken sailor father hasn't been my neighbor since 1954, and while my head-cold feels a good 25% better (I bow to you, Anima Mundi, Great Primal Mover of the Universe), it has been joined by one of my arrhythmias. 

An the (erratic) beat goes on. 

So, Ho-Ho-Ho and warm regard from icy Philadelphia and a one who is grateful that his office hasn't taken a major hit since 28 September 1993 at 305 PM. 

(Wanna hear a joke that I didn't consider funny, my youngish physician visitor wanted to finish the the last 50 minutes of our meeting even though a 50' Beech Tree had planted itself through the roof vertically into the far corner of the office.)

I began calling him "Tornado Albert." .

"Life used to be so hard"

"Life used to be so hard" ... Crosby et Freres when they were in their twenties, I suppose. Maybe, it's more like "Life used to be so easy." I dunno. When I have a cold, I become even more of a skeptic than I typically am.

I have a head cold.  My body above the neck has become a little mucous generator and pump .... and my head feels like a watermelon about to be smashed by that guy who smashes watermelons. I have no idea what his name is and am close to offering up a blessing for the capacity to recall my own. I got a couple of hours of sleep but it was too uncomfortable to be lying down.

I'm much like the image portrayed on the cold remedy TV commercials. Indeed, can there be anyone who is so righteous as to have been granted immunity to these viruses? Maybe house-dogs who don't have playdates or business meetings with others in the world of doggery don't pass their viruses about to each other. There is something, isn't there, called Kennel Cough ... No wonder GuntherDog shivers and shakes when he goes on rare occasions to be boarded. He knows the truth -- distance thineself from others and sit alone in the back pew in church!

I took a shower ... supposed to help. A colleague suggested that I stick tissues up my nose and walk in circles in the living-room. It reminded me of a comment made when I called a colleague with a problem about 2AM sometime around Summer 1969. He and some others (Bill, Milton and Jean-Claude) came over and brought a friend, an Indian Chemist, Arvin, then living in South America. Arvin proceeded to get drunk and his friends decided for undisclosed reasons that Arvin should be left with M, I and our two older kids. It may be that they divined that he was about to get violently ill from the ingested poisons. M & I had little experience with vomiting Chemists and called Bill.

H: What do we do ... Arvin's sick? ...
B: Why you calling me? He's your houseguest.
H: I didn't know we were playing tag and I was elected "IT" ...
B: Hey. Phyllis is feeding Max. Whaddya want?
H: Some advice wouldn't hurt.
B: Fair enough. Take a navel orange. It's gotta be a navel orange.
H: OK
B: Inject it with 10,000 mg of Vitamin C.
H: OK ... OK ... But how do I get him to eat it?
B: Eat it? You take that fortified navel and cram it up his ass!
    Click.

But back to the shower ...

Thought: Colds never really feel bad until you have one. In the shower, I thought of all the people I've heard talking about how "I hate this and I hate that" and the others that give it a 50-Cent name ... Upper Respiratory Infection ... URI, for those in the know ... or "I know it's the Swine Flu cause I feel like I got hit by a &^%$%^# truck" which is supposed to be diagnostic. I typically respond with (knowing that my little joke is getting old) ... "Hate? I only hate death and nuclear holocaust and I'm not absolutely certain about either of those."

Then, I remembered Jim Henson, the Muppet/Puppet Guy ... He thought it was ONLY a cold and dropped dead. Yesterday was M's Birthday and she got to eat dinner with Typhoid Howard from the Last Quarter Howards. Good thing she lives in the same Quarter, aye?

#--Hashtag-Whatta?

Hey, Mom ... while I have your attention ... Do you possibly know what a "hashtag" is? I don't seem to get it. You'd be surprised ... but lots has changed since you went off to your new World!

Much love ...

Howard (and M -- M's Birthday is tomorrow ... she's c 50 years older than when you met her ... Geez!)

Denver and Seattle in NJ

Associations in the mind .... that warm the eyes ....

In 1972, my parents who were still in their empty-nest 50's moved to within 10 miles of the stadium where the Superbowl teams crashed bodies and heads ,,, the venue in which the football-war broke out, last night. My Dad got a new job as a printer and they lived there for the last 30 or so years of their lives ... though my Mom needed to be in a Nursing Home when her ability to speak and understand melted into the Great Uncharted. They're buried up there (100 miles North of where M & I live) in a little town, Passaic, NJ. My Father chose a hillside grave plot within eye shot of the New York skyline. There they lie ... As far as I know, none of their children visit very often, myself included. President Obama made a joke about visiting parents to help them get on and negotiate the Obamacare-ACA website ... a light note during his State of the Union Address ... don't know that he had in mind graveside visits?

I could run up there and tell my Father about the game; I suppose I could.

Dad, Seattle cleaned up on Denver. Payton Manning never really got started out of the gate. Oh, and that really smart guy from Stanford, Sherman, who had a dissociated kind of rant againt that pretty newscaster ... he got hurt.

Howard, I told you when you were 5 why I never took you to Ebbetts Field to see those Bums, the Dodgers play ... that there were two things that should be thoroughly enjoyed but not observed by others and that one of them was professional athletics and that you'd learn about the other when you were older. Don't you remember. Hey, did you find out about the other Participant-non-Observer Sport?

Dad, I remember and I did. And, hey, I grew up liking sports and sex but without much of an interest in watching professional athletics or ogling other people having sex. .... Think I'll push over and talk to Mom for a bit. You hang in there!

Mom, M and I really miss you. Miss you, too, Dad. Saturday night, Mom, we visited your oldest Sister's son, David, and his wife. They were visiting one of their grown kids, one of the twins. He's doing a post-Doc in Applied Math and is married to a warm and very sweet pediatrician. Imagine! Your Sister  Lily's grandson ... all grown up ... leading a very productive religious and academic life with his wife and their two year old. We walked into their place and the 2 year old immediately warmed up. He's one of those tall and beefy kids ... like I was .... but such a sweet kid. In moments, he was a very welcome visitor in M's lap. David's wife is doing a family bio on her ancestors. David and N  have been married for 46 years ... just a few years shy of M and I. Geez. How the years have flown. We occasionally see you middle sister Helen's grandkids and great-grandkids, too. But what to say? We really miss those times sitting around your table and singing Psalms after dinners that you and Dad would prepare. When I was a kid, I'd see that your eyes would warm when we'd sing .... maybe it was that line from the beginning ... "Those who plant with tears, reap with joy." Much earlier I remember you and Grandma looking out the window as the sun was setting on the Sabbath singing melodically in your Germanic language: Gott fum Avrohom ... God of Abraham! I think my eyes would fill up listening to it. You might not know or want to know that most followers of the Abrahimic religions -- Christians, Jews, Moslems -- barely notice the Sabbath. But you and Grandma would sing to God, thank Him (Her?) for the gift of Sacred Sabbaths and hope for a week of goodness and health, of good fortune and a chance to make a living. Sabbath is for Shopping and Superbowls! Sad to think, isn't it, that the beautifully poetic notion of a sacred restfulness is lost on most people ... whether their day is Friday, Saturday or Sunday. A guy named Hirsch sometime in the late 19th C. said that it was a day that we accepted ourselves as equal creations with others and with our brother animals ... when we gave up pretending to be Creators, ourselves.

Mom, you must be crying by now. Made you cry. Sorry.

Howard, "Those who plant with tears, with joy they reap." That's what King David the Psalmist said.

Mom,  Cousin David the Mystic said I should dance more!

Bye, for now.

Toilet-Bowl Sunday

I could get the chips and dips ready and clean my waiting room toilet, today, in honor of the annual NFL parade of Sexuality, Aggression and Ad Campaigns that support our (type of) Economy. As I've aged, I do tend to have certain idiosyncratic holy days ... days set aside for particular purposes. July 4th is my decision day. I sit as still as I can and make those decisions that are reasonably decidable/makeable. How many hours a week shall I work? What does the house need? The office? Is late term abortion REALLY too late when your kids are 38, 47 and 48! .... Ah! That was a little joke ... I'm gonna hanging out occasionally with spawn and grandspawn till I'm -- as they say -- called home.

Having lived a life in seminaries from early on and in very religious environments, I didn't find out about this particular holy day till the late 1970's when a colleague and his wife, Bill and Joanne, invited us to something called a Superbowl Party. There was food and much good cheer. The first year, we brought a bottle of good scotch and -- out of my discomfort with this bit of secular Americana -- I drank a good deal of it. Another Bill in attendance, a Presby Minister, made the mistake of getting me started on talking about commentaries on the Scriptures. Poor Bill! I must've bored him to death and intruded on his passion for the game. Well, those of you who read my meanderings chances are know how ponderous I can be. There ARE some people who should never drink ... DWB ... Drinking While Biblicizing just ain't fair to others.

There were more such parties until my colleague, Bill, began losing some of his previously sharp grasp on things and, together with Joanne, moved to Texas. While I hear from them from time to time, Bill is apparently no longer able to speak on the phone. The Fourth Quarter has the most fortunate among us a bit addled ... and we are sad for those less fortunate. Minister Bill left, too -- maybe with one of his congregants -- and we've lost touch with the other Superbowl Party attendees.

Zo! M and I are not only orphaned of our parents, but Superbowl orphans, as well. We'll go to see a play at a local theater with Milt and Ruthie, but by the time we get out and eat dinner, it may well be bedtime. M and I will head home to watch parts of the game with GuntherDog, but neither Gunther nor I knows whose playing.

I do know Payton Manning is no longer where he was but is playing well on one of the championship teams .... and I do know that the Toiletbowl in the Waiting Room bathroom will be cleaned and ... I am confident that Chris Christie of New Jersey (and Federal) Heat fame will do his best to repeatedly sack David Wildstein, .... still, once more.

Oh! I, also, know that I'm supposed to (and chances are won't) make a hoagie or a submarine or a hero sandwich and to get pissed if my team loses. Hate to ruin the atmosphere, but what would the Prophet Malachi say about the Superbowl? Ah! He'd chances are bore the hell out of poor Minister Bill, just like I'd love to, again.

Happy Holy Day to all.

Need to Get Back in Saddle

Old Man days ... just leaving an 11 hour arrhythmia ... a little tired ... With any luck ... "I'll be back."

It's pretty clear why Fourth Quarter types shouldn't have children in their care and should pare back some of their obligations.

Tough in this state to get it going for AM talk about Sex and Aggression.

Bye